


Schreie, Reißverschlüsse, Träume (Screams, Zippers, Dreams)

by CharismaticEnticer



Category: Die Anstalt
Genre: Autism, Blood, Colored Words, Custom Skinned, Dream Analysis, Dreams, Gen, Language Barrier, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Minor Violence, POV Alternating, POV Third Person Limited, Present Tense, Spoilers, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 12:49:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/622312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharismaticEnticer/pseuds/CharismaticEnticer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sheep and hippo have each made a step forward in their therapy. Their sleeping minds could drag them a step back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Schreie, Reißverschlüsse, Träume (Screams, Zippers, Dreams)

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic posted to AO3 - might as well make it a gen one! 
> 
> EDIT 04/01/13: When I first posted this a day ago, I didn't know how to make the words different colours. But now I do, so you can get the fic's full intended effect. Sorry for being a klutz when it comes to AO3 HTML. ^^;
> 
> Originally written and published on December 31st 2011.
> 
> Die Anstalt © Martin Kittsteiner.

Dolly sees him in her dreams. The golden ball on the end of a silver string is not here to gauge and analyse. Her subconscious can do what it pleases. So it brings in the hippo again.  
  
As before, they wear the same sock, but different. Both cover their faces. His is yellow and green; hers is orange and red.  
  
They are back in the forest that leads to the forbidden glen. She doesn't know why it reeks of fear and danger, only that they shouldn't be heading that way. But she is not in control in this world of dreams, so they follow the untrodden path nonetheless.  
  
She bounds, trying desperately to maintain the fragile delusion that she is a sheep, the delusion only these dreams can provide. He merely walks, one foot in front of the other.  
  
What does her unconscious mind see in the hippo? As far as she knows, he has always been a constant in the institution that serves as their current home. But in that time, he has never spoken a word. Small wonder: his mouth is zipped shut, under the yellow and green in her dream, and shows no signs of opening. Besides, she doubts he would have anything to say.  
  
So why does he invade her dreams? Is he looking for someone to talk at him? If so, he is on the wrong path. She can speak, but not through voice. Through projections of words, much like the raven. She thinks, and they somehow understand... if they can comprehend English. Which, through experience, he cannot.  
  
She knows a little German...but whenever she thinks she is speaking it, she has slipped out of her current mind for a while. And when she returns from the blackout, she can taste anger and red, and her sheep delusion is shattered anew.  
  
When she is German, she is a wolf once again.  
  
But there is no German in here, only silence. It is now that she realizes just how much so. The forest has never been loud, but here it is deathly still as they walk. There are no smells of sodden bark or musty air. Branches do not crackle as sheep and hippo push them back to go through. The leaves under their feet do not crunch; they are wet, but do not leave a drop of water on the fabric.  
  
The landscape changes and they are in a new section where she has never been before. Unending pieces of string tie themselves around the trees. She turns, and they change. In fact, they fluctuate in position every time she adjusts her view, no matter how slight the turn of the head.  
  
She almost loses track of the hippo. He finds a familiar block swarming in string knots, the one that looks like a bridge. He reaches for it, tugs at it.  
  
And all at once, in an uproar of movement, the strings consume them, and they are thrust from the two dimensions of sight and awareness into the elusive third of sense. The unending thin ropes burn, rubbing against the skin. They stretch, bend the trunks, crackling like firewood. The sensation of floating hovers just out of recognition.  
  
The strings change color, red and yellow and orange and green, and the cold bites her muzzle, and they are tangled in the makings of their own socks.  
  
A green thread passes through a hole in the slider that closes the mouth of the hippo. His eyes widen, his mouth trembles, he tugs as it does in the opposite direction, trying to resist.  
  
She tastes blood in her mouth, tense and metallic.  
  
His zip unzips.  
  
A torrent, a torment, of words and objects spills out, landing on the strings and getting caught up in the increasing mass. A pen, a hairband, one plus X squared minus Y, the guilt, more green, a brush, a **scream** , apologies, a phone number, the square root of X cubed, objects unrecognizable.  
  
And, as a throbbing counterpoint, a sentence in German, the language Dolly never wanted to hear in the voice she never thought she would.  
  
 _Sie sollten mich nicht sehen wie dieses._  
  
\---  
  
Lilo sees her in his nightmare. The one he told the therapist about, the one where he cannot escape getting crushed, is one of many that disturbs him at night. But he has never had this one before, insofar as he can remember.  
  
The floor is a puzzle underneath him. Every mile is another part of a jigsaw, of one landscape or another. He starts on an overview of the main hall, where bird and turtle and snake and box alike are caught in a snapshot of their daily remnants of lives.  
  
He is not on the floor, for he is the one tasked with completing the puzzles. But she, the sheep, speeds off into the horizon, the other missing piece.  
  
He makes after her, holding a box of pieces, flat and slightly curved and including his own C and T blocks, not so comforting now they are joined. As he finds holes in the floor, the pieces he needs rise to the top, and all seem to fit into place after a little struggling. Rather unlike the sheep herself.  
  
She intrigues him, this animal with the fastening on her stomach. He has watched her from the corner of his eye sometimes, inbetween struggles with his blocks. She grazes on the floor like a sheep, even with no grass to speak of. But then she looks to the lowered sky and barks erupt from her mouth. A barking sheep defies any form of logic, and anything that defies logic is simultaneously a deterrant and a fascination to him.  
  
The path of his pursuit leads him to a puzzle of a meadow with little  orange flowers. The piece he grabs this time is incomplete, obviously a part of the puzzle but not big enough to fit into any of the holes.  
  
He once again looks at the joined blocks, and a pang of self-flagellation strikes. If he is so logical, why did he need to go to sleep to fit together the two halves of a single whole? And why does their joining make him shiver? He has what he wanted, doesn't he? He has been trying to create the whole for so long. Now he has achieved his goal, why the wariness?  
  
In frustration, he just jams the piece he holds into the closest hole. It expands before his eyes to fill in the gap, but still looks wrong. Or is it the only correct piece in a square mile of faults?  
  
Perhaps the latter. Once the puzzle is complete, a tearing noise fills the air, making him flinch. The meadow is scratched, long and deep, three times.  
  
And suddenly the nonsensical sheep again, on the next part of the floor, a white square. No, not white, yellow, now that he is up close. Then why do the pieces he pulls out shine white instead? Or red, in the case of the joined blocks?  
  
He wishes for a dream where logic could be consistent, rather than fluctuating and full of subversions and aces. A world where sheep are sheep, X is X and hippos could live peacefully with their owners again. But all these wishes are futile, he realizes in a chain of thought that can only come in dreams.  
  
A growl erupts, but it is not from his mouth. He cannot open it to talk. He feels he mustn't, but he can't place why. It sounds again, this time clearly coming from the sheep. Why does she growl at him? He is only trying to help.  
  
He takes a step over the white yellow red square to make sure she is okay. She shivers herself, tries to get away from him, why is she scared? But she slips and her foot lands in a gap where a piece should go.  
  
A bell **screams** , the floor shatters. Hippo, sheep and puzzles fall into blackness.  
  
He grabs onto his blocks as they tumble, keeping them close. Even if they betray him by making him question his logic, they make him feel safe. The poor sheep has nothing; the pieces fall out of her hooves.  
  
Somewhere in the middle, her zip starts to undo. She panics, tugs it back upwards, as close to her muzzle as she can, but the downward pull is too strong.  
  
He tastes bile in his mouth, his throat constricts with a pinprick.  
  
Her zip unzips.  
  
From her stomach bursts a monster. It leaps onto him, tearing into his voice, digging its claws into his stomach and adding red to red on purple, dead eyes, black eyes, a growling barking horrific unpuzzle wolf, or at least the front half of it, the sheep trying and failing to pull it back inside of her.  
  
She looks at him in apology and Lilo hears a sentence in a language that he has never taken time to learn, but somehow understands.  
  
 _I didn't want you to see me like this._  
  
\---  
  
Dolly and Lilo wake from their nightmares with a start, back in the almost-dark asylum in their simple white beds. The sheep is tangled up in the covers. The hippo has accidentally pushed them off.  
  
They reorient themselves and their covers. Chunks of the dreams have already faded, as these things tend to do. All that remain are the primacy of forests, puzzles and each other, and the recency of  red and green and sentences in opposite languages. And, as well, the fear they felt.  
  
They look at each other, the first across from the second. They look at their respective zips. They look into each other's eyes. Did the vulnerable secret states revealed to them in the subconscious mean anything? Was it truth? Lies? Dream logic?  
  
The clock on the wall reads 2:15, they think.  
  
They each retreat under the covers with their respective dreams and zippers and pasts. They remain silent externally, either through inability to talk or courtesy.  
  
Inside their minds, where there are no boundaries to protect them,  
  
 **they scream.**


End file.
